I certainly have read enough. I didn’t like the authoritarian character of the Jesus in this book. It really just didn’t sound like the same person to me, and definitely not an improvement.
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Didn’t someone say that God uses bad Greek?
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I hope you can forgive my confusion here, but I do at least think I understand that you are arguing that the Earth ‘bringing forth’ living things = abiogenesis + the theory of evolution. I’m not saying that you hold to spontaneous generation, but what I am saying is that many of the church fathers you quoted above did actually think that. The best science of their day did include spontaneous generation (and with evidence like maggots on meat or other phenomenon) and the idea of God mediating his creative power through creation was seen in this verse as the process of SG. At this point we can ask, which of these two readings makes more sense:
- The first part of the verse ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures’ refers to abiogenesis and the process of evolution. The second half of the verse mentions very modern things that would not have arisen until very recently (like fruit). The earth bringing forth originally consisted of a single cell which some eventually gained the ability to harness energy from the sun (cyanobacteria). The next steps were not really seed bearing land plants, nor fruit with seeds. After this first life/photosynethic life, over a billion years later we have more complex things like red algae. Maybe 3 billion years after this once plants make it to land we have the first seed bearing plants but fruit would not come until later.
- The first part of the verse ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures’ refers to the then best scientific concept held by much of the ancient world of spontaneous generation. It is very natural to go right from SG to there being vegetation and seed bearing plants as 3 billions of years worth of evolution could not have been imagined by the original writers.
You can make day 1 lots of different things if we’re picking from modern science. Some good options are:
- Yours I’m not quite sure though you do say “This simple sentence “Let there be light,” proves God was thinking about 3 of the 4 fundamental forces in the first planning event.”
- The hypothetical baryogenesis event which antimatter/matter annihilated creating the first photons
- The CMB formation which actually makes up the majority of our universe’s photon budget though the CMB would be more like a foggy haze
- The formation of the first stars ‘in the darkness’ - literally speaking light forms amongst haloes and clusters of dark matter
- The era of reionization that was quite possibly a very dramatic let there be light type of moment over a long period of time
- The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy or formation of the solar system (the ‘let there be light’ can be our sun)
- Or go like Reasons to Believe and argue On day one, the opaque atmosphere became translucent, just clear enough to allow the passage of light. However, an Earth-bound observer would not, at this point, have seen the sources of this light. (As Hugh explains it, h āy â— the Hebrew verb used in the phrase “Let there be light”—does not indicate that light came into existence for the first time on day one.)
Yes Anaximander had some promising ideas, but his description of evolution was something like this:
Anaximander of Miletus considered that from warmed up water and earth emerged either fish or entirely fishlike animals. Inside these animals, men took form and embryos were held prisoners until puberty; only then, after these animals burst open, could men and women come out, now able to feed themselves.
While the Greek world is important, especially with regards to the New Testament cosmology and early church fathers, it is not part of the ancient near east and would have played a lesser role in the worldview of the natural world for the ancient Israelites.
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My thoughts exactly
Anyone up for a totally radical look at Genesis? I got something you never heard that, if you hold to God being the true guiding force to scripture, than it pretty much shows the necessity to some acknowledgment that the bible is teaching a 6000 year history from the beginning.
Hi Robin, I have read Schroeder’s book and the basis of his idea on the days is this:
“If, during those first six days, a clock had been suspended in that part of the universe now occupied by the Earth, it would not necessarily have recorded 15 billion years. In the early universe, the curvature of space and time in this spot was probably different than it is now.” ~ Gerald Schroeder Genesis and the Big Bang, (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 52
Now, I don’t think those relativistic time dilations will save Genesis’s days. The reason is if you put those days into our time, and not making them pre-temporal as I do, the order of events is all screwed up. The order does not match geological data. I wish he had known more geology.
I am not impressed with Collin’s view of how to fit science with the Bible. It basically holds that if there is a conflice the Bible loses. That is what Accommodationalism [sic according to Mitch" does.
Fair enough. If you haven’t read it, it is hard to draw conclusions. I appreciate that position.
The document that Buddha supposedly wrote, the Dhammapada, is equally a book of wisdom about human behavior. It makes no statements that can be confirmed or rejected by observational data, which I found a bit disappointing, but your statement clearly raises the issue that if I am describing things correctly, should we be ‘primitive Buddhists’ just because it has wisdom about human relations.? The same thing applies to Daoism (the religion of my dau. in-laws father up until he became a Christian). It too is wise in the ways of human relations. But is that really the mark of the Divine? I think not.
Nor would it be correct for me to say that I just ‘accept’ the Bible whole cloth. I wrestle with it and try to understand it. I accept it in the same way that Jacob just meekly accepted the visiting angel of the Lord. [Hint - he didn’t - and walked away limping, but with a blessing for his troubles.] I believe the Bible is true not because it
I certainly didn’t accept the Bible ‘whole cloth’ until I had found a way to concord it with earth history. I wouldn’t say one has to accept it just because it is the Bible, that would be illogical. But I don’t think one should accept it if it is false on everything observable either. That is insanity to me. That is what accommodationalists do, in my opinion.
What the Church Fathers believed is not generally believed to be Divinely inspired. They like us struggled to understand this universe and like us, they were wrong on some things. I do think their philosophical positions, like mediated creation is interesting. No, it isn’t proof of divine inspiration for them, but it is evidence that this anti-evolutionary/anti science fixation modern Christians have didn’t exist back then.
Of the two options you list, I chose the first. Given our current state of knowledge that fits better. The Church fathers didn’t know about DNA. But ask yourself this. Do we know everything there is to know? How much of our science is cow patties? I can guarantee that either quantum or Gravition theory must yield to the other because these theories are incompatible on multiple levels. Gravity requires smooth space-time. quantum needs quantized space. One can’t have both concepts at the same time. The conservation principles of physics don’t work with quantized space-time. Noether’s theorm works only on continuous functions. So clearly we dont’ know everything in physics and I can’t believe we know everything in biology or chemistry. Our descendants will think us stupid but we did the best we could with what we know.
You wrote: You can make day 1 lots of different things if we’re picking from modern science. Some good options are:
and then list a lot of things. I didn’t go to all those other things other than what is absolutely necessary for the existence of light. Light can’t exist if it doesn’t have space-time (relativity). Light can’t exist without E&M, and obviously now the Weak force as well since it is part of E&M. I didn’t go with galaxies etc because they are not absolutely necessary for electromagnetic radiation to exist.
As to Reason to Believe’s idea about the atmosphere, as a geoscientist, their idea is absolutely NUTS. There is no time in geologic history that sunlight didn’t reach the ground in sufficient quantities to keep life alive. There is evidence in the form of Stromatolites of photosynthesis taking place as far back as 3.5 billion years ago–they need light. There is isotopic evidence of photosynthesis going back to 3.8 billion years. http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/154/2/434
There is evidence of life back to 4 billion years ago or more.
The earliest known life forms on Earth are putative fossilized microorganisms found in hydrothermal vent precipitates. The earliest time that life forms first appeared on Earth is at least 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years, or even 4.5 billion years; not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago. Earliest known life forms - Wikipedia
The odd thing about this evidence is that this was during the Hadean bombardment period, when there could be clouds thrown up by impacts which should have sterilized the earth. this is a problem that needs a solution.
Yes Anaximander had some promising ideas, but his description of evolution was something like this:
Anaximander of Miletus considered that from warmed up water and earth emerged either fish or entirely fishlike animals. Inside these animals, men took form and embryos were held prisoners until puberty; only then, after these animals burst open, could men and women come out, now able to feed themselves.
I would say, so what? We are talking about what God COULD have communicated to the ancient Hebrew. God could have stated a simple truth like in the quote I used, and the Hebrews COULD have understood that. That is what is wrong with Accommodationalism, It assumes no matter what God said, the Hebrews were too stupid to understand anything, even simple statements. Per se, what Anaximander believed wrong about evolution isn’t the important issue. It is what God could have said hat the Hebrews would have understood.
If God could have said something true about evolution that they could understand, then it undercuts the need for god to accommodate.
While the Greek world is important, especially with regards to the New Testament cosmology and early church fathers, it is not part of the ancient near east and would have played a lesser role in the worldview of the natural world for the ancient Israelites.
My point with Anaximander is that a contemporary, who was no smarter or dumber than the Hebrews could understand what everyone says the Jews couldn’t understand. Do we believe that the Jewish people were congenitally stupider than the Greeks? I would say they weren’t. Accommodation seems to me to say they were stupider.
You seem dead set on why I reject the book of Mormons but don’t reject the Torah. Well it’s the same for why I reject all religions except for Christianity as being true.
Since I believe in Christianity that means that I accept the word of God as being true, even if not literal, and that I view the Old Testament and New Testament as being divinely inspired by God.
So does the book of Mormons have religious teachings that I find to be a doctrinal contradiction to the gospels and epistles of the apostles. My answer is yes. I feel that the Book of Mormon contradicts the gospels and books of the apostles in two ways.
- It’s doctrine does not mine up.
- The way it was created does not line up.
The Old Testament was given to the Jews by the prophets who helped lead them. It was the words inspired by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament is made up of two aspects. The recordings of the Messiah and his apostles as the church was developed. Then books wrote by the apostles to the churches guiding them. Every one of the epistles were wrote by the apostles who were hand selected by Jesus Christ and the apostles all approved one another. Jesus approved there 11 and later Paul and the 11 approved of Paul. Jospeh the Mormon leader did not have that. He was not selected by Jesus, and neither did the apostles accept him (they were all dead)
Lastly, accommodation in the sense you’re using means to accommodate an opposing concept. The opposing concept can’t be science because that would mean science opposed faith and that’s not true. So the opposing concepts must be atheism. That would mean we are denying faith in order to accommodate atheism and that’s ridiculous. Also, because someone disagrees with a literal interpretation does not mean we don’t believe in it.
Science is not why I believe that the creation account is mythological in nature. I believe it’s mythological in nature based off of how it’s written.
The first reason is how ambiguous the first two accounts are. The first account is done is two sets of 3 with the final day separate and for rest. 3 creations of living things and three creations of non living things.
The intro is god created the heavens and earth. Then it explains in detail thst intro. Though it never clarified where all the water came from. The earth and space was just water.
Day 1. In this universe of water , without stars, God created light and separated it from darkness.
Day 2. God then separates this celestial free water universe into waters up above ( space) from waters below ( earth). Separated the waters above and below with a dome. A solid dome.
Day 3. God then separated the waters below from one another ( earth) and made dry land appear. The vegetation sprouts.
Day 4. Then on day four God causes stars and other celestial bodies to come into existence. That means He made the earth before he made the moon, and he made light before he made the sun. Which means the water and plants somehow did not die from freezing temps before the sun was created. What about how mars and earth and the moon was at one time possibly one planet. How could a impact have broken it up without anything being created.
Other days …
Then besides those obviously scientifically inccorect issue if taken literal we see two different accounts. The days and order is different. It also goes from all men and woman created on day 6 to something like in the morning Adam was made and he named every animal and then was out asleep around the afternoon and by night he was awake with Eve made form a rib. In order for creation 1 and creation 2 to be same that would have to be the conclusion.
Then there is the issue of leviathan being created. A multi headed sea dragon that God later battles and kills and throws his corpse around the world.
So no matter what you want to argue the fact is scripturally it taken literally, and many Jews did in some ways, that the heavens was water and that water was kept off of use by a solid dome. The earth never had a solid dome around it liked the clearly believed it did.
On top of this you do know the books were wrote by moses. By the time moses was around and started the faith there was older faiths already there. Those older faiths had similar stories. Those stories shaped the understanding of these people’s worldview. God then gave them a message that connected to that world view but made him the creator.
Then there are other things like how in Joshua he believed the sun stopped which means he believed it moved. He did not know the earth revolved around the sun. I disagree with his understanding here not as a literary device but because it’s scientifically wrong. Genesis 1-2 is scientifically wrong but that’s not why I think it’s a myth. M
I’m too tired to do the clearly tonight.
Also “ accommodation” as you want to keep classifying it does not mean I think Hebrews were stupid. It means that they had no idea about the in-depth knowledge of science we have nowadays just like we will be way behind on the basics of science people have 300 years from now.
So what accommodation means is that God looked around these ancient people (and ancient can mean early people and is a common secular way to refer to people from that era. We call ancient Egypt ancient for a reason as opposed to whatever Egypt) and saw how they understood the world. The stories they grew up with. The stories the Jews understood from other Semitic tribes and ancient Egyptians and from their own oral histories. We can look at multiple faiths then and see what was the common world view. Then God through the Holy Spirit tweaked those world views to show he was the creator. They had no basis what so ever to understand what we know now. Our world views are completely different. Mapping theology and concepts into already existing world view does not equal Hebrews to stupid to understand.
It’s also not crazy or far fetched to believe God speaks with hyperbolic imagery, parables, and so on. After all the Holy Spirit guided the book of revelation which I assume you “accommodated “ to fit a belief other than a literal telling. The Holy Spirit also guided faith through poetry. Jesus, who was a God made flesh, often spoke with parables and fake stories. Surely you don’t think the prodigal son was a literal history Jesus knew but was a fictitious story. So it makes sense God did the same and it’s evident in genesis.
There are so many things wrong with this statement. The static universe was only proposed in science by Thomas Digges in the 16th century. Though there was a philosopher in the 13th century who was condemned by the pope for suggesting such a thing. So there was no rivalry to the Christian view in Europe for most of the time mentioned. And outside Europe I would say that most cultures had creation stories saying that the universe had a beginning including the Pangu Chinese, the Zoroastrians, the Mali and Tanzanians in Africa, the Maori of New Zealand, the Batak and Sunda of Indonesia, Japanese, and the Mongolians.
You’ve got to give up this ‘stupider’ thing already. Accommodation says nothing of the sort and it never did. I don’t know why you keep imaging that to be the case. People are smart, they tried to figure out how the world around them worked. They figured out that the world was round and even were able to predict some eclipses through the geocentric model with reasonable accuracy. They had some evidence for spontaneous generation but one thing that they never seemed to do (while some occasional thinkers proposed things like atoms) is write down a bunch of modern Physics beyond a few bits and phrases that sound like modern science. They were only engaging the science of their day. Sure, obviously the Bible mentions the moon and yeah, it’s talking about the same thing we call the moon, but the moon was a lesser light in the same firmament/sky/expanse as the sun and stars. That was a model of the cosmos from before the time of Aristotle and it was a pretty good description of how things worked. Today we would call it ‘wrong’ if you still held to that, but it was the best science of their day and the writers of the Bible encountered God through an ancient understanding of the cosmos. That’s a wonderful thing and we are called (under accommodationalism since we know our understanding today of nature is incomplete) to worship God through our understanding of the universe as learned from the tools of modern science.
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As an aside, I hope you won’t mind Mr. Krumm if I use this opportunity to point out that I am only one degree more rejecting of religion than yourself. (I think that may put me in a better light.)
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… and teaching it in error.
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I look forward to your explanation of how waters below is impossible.
I am not sure who you are replying to, but I can’t find that you and I have even discussed the book of Mormon, and I just searched this thread. Please point to where this took place. I will thank you for fixing my memory.
When you write
The Old Testament was given to the Jews by the prophets who helped lead them. It was the words inspired by the Holy Spirit.
I think it is on the nature of Inspiration that part of this debate rests. If God ‘inspires’ a false story on something that is observable and can be observed to be false, then how can we trust Him on things where we can’t verify the statement observationally?
Lastly, accommodation in the sense you’re using means to accommodate an opposing concept. The opposing concept can’t be science because that would mean science opposed faith and that’s not true. So the opposing concepts must be atheism. That would mean we are denying faith in order to accommodate atheism and that’s ridiculous.
Back during my years of doubt, I was on several atheist listserves, and private email groups. You probably haven’t noticed my complaint in several of my threads, that the arguments used by accommodationalists for the Bible not having science are the same arguments that Atheists use to say that the Bible is untrue! You may not believe that, you may not care about that, but that is the truth. go look at Some Reasons Why Humanists Reject The Bible - American Humanist Association
In this very thread, the order of events in Genesis 1 has been used as a way to say Genesis 1 has no science, and the above link you will find atheists using the very same argument but concluding, I think logically, that if this is the order of events, the Bible is false.
You write:
Also, because someone disagrees with a literal interpretation does not mean we don’t believe in it.
Wow, What do you believe about it. If words don’t have normal meaning, then the account can take on any meaning anyone wants to give it. If it isn’t to be taken literally, then neither should the sentence “In Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” be taken literally. Why this exception to believe that literally God created the heavens and the earth, but disbelieve the objective truth in the rest of it. If word don’t have normal meaning then we can be like Pevaquark who said that if I find something about Nature in Genesis 1, I would be pretending to think that the word actually meant something about nature. Maybe Genesis 1 is about teddy bears.
In another post #148, you wrote:
Also “ accommodation” as you want to keep classifying it does not mean I think Hebrews were stupid. It means that they had no idea about the in-depth knowledge of science we have nowadays just like we will be way behind on the basics of science people have 300 years from now.
I keep pointing out THEY DIDNT NEED AN IN DEPTH KNOWLEDGE TO UNDERSTAND A TRUE STATEMENT ABOUT NATURE. I capitalized it so maybe someone can explain why a college degree was required for them to understand something true about Nature?
You wrote:
Then God through the Holy Spirit tweaked those world views to show he was the creator. They had no basis what so ever to understand what we know now. Our world views are completely different
But since God is the communicator, we can be sure that HIS world view hasn’t changed from that day. Since, it is said God can’t lie, why on earth would we believe that He is willing to lie about the nature of his Creation?
When you compare Genesis 1 to Revelation, arguing for a nonliteral reading of both, logically you could make that same claim about the stories that a man arose from the dead. So that argument can be used against any passage of the Bible. Secondly, there really is little comparison between the imagery of Revelation with anything else in the Bible, maybe Ezekiel and other prophets might compare but not Gen 1.
.
I can’t help but think of this quote:
“The Bible shows the way to go to Heaven, not the way the heavens go.”–Galileo Galelei
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You know, if someone tells me that they are not going to explain something to me because it would be too difficult for me to understand, I would take that as a comment on either my intelligence or my stupidity. So when you tell me to give up on this ‘stupider’ thing, I think you need to read the actual statements IN THIS THREAD!
*So again , not onky are these early men, but as stated the message was given to them
in a way they can understand
Do I think God tailors his message to communicate most effectively to his immediate audience? Yes.
Except talk to people at their own level apparently. Your God can’t do the one thing that really counts: connect with people where they’re at. Any “accommodation” so that the locals understand, and you suddenly have conniptions about God not speaking to them using your 21st century jargon.
While God could have easily explained science to the ancient audience, I think it would have been difficult for them to understand
I will leave the names off these quotes but they are easily searchable. In each of these statements is the claim that the local yokels would be unable to understand if God gave them a simple but truthful summary of something about Nature. The very statement that they can’t understand, is a statement about the local yokel’s abilities. I would love to give up the ‘stupider’ argument as soon as people quit impuning the local’s intelligence by claiming they couldn’t understand.
My wife had a Downs syndrome uncle. There was much he couldn’t understand. But normal adults without this uncle’s handicap could have understood and believed anything God told them.
There is something that is totally different in this sentence above. God isn’t inspiring or speaking to you about the structure of Nature. In Genesis 1 god is seen speaking about the structure of nature and it seems to me, that if it doesn’t match what we know, maybe we should look for an interpretation that allows it to match rather than just saying God spouted nonsense to a bunch of people who were incapable of understanding truth anyway. For that is what the quotes above imply. No the quotes clearly state, that they couldn’t understand it if God spoke truth…
This is kinda off topic for this thread. First off, I don’t believe your statement, because you will take what I say and go back to your teacher and ask how to answer it. But here goes.
You need to knw a couple of things about rocks though. The source of sand and clay is Granite, which are chemical weathering products. It takes time to turn granite into sand and clay, and just smashing up the granite doesn’t produce sand and clay, it produces what is called arkosic sand–basically unweathered granite sand-sized particles.
"Consider the weathering of granite, which is composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar. If the rates of weathering are relatively slow, the micas and feldspar will have ample time to break down into fine-grained clay minerals; the quartz grains may be rounded, but they will not alter chemically because of the great stability of quartz. The resultant products of this granite therefore will be brought to the area of deposition as fine quartz sand mixed with finer-grained clays. The quartz sands may accumulate as nearshore or beach sands while the clays are carried farther offshore, where they eventually settle out of suspension as mud. If this same granite had been subjected to more rapid rates of weathering and transportation, then the sedimentary deposits would have been quite different. The feldspars and micas would have been incompletely weathered and thus little altered, and would be deposited as fine sand mixed with the quartz grains, yielding a sediment of different composition and texture from that in the first case." Leo F. Laporte, Ancient Environments , Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1979, p. 14
So I have modified your waters below picture to include the pillars you wanted.
What your guy says happened is that the crust collapsed and the water spewed out all over the earth. Let’s first focus on the crust. What was it made of ? I should have asked you this before going into this thing, and I hope you won’t play slippery, greasey guy, Lets say that the crust is granite. Then when they collapsed into the waters, we should see granite bodies out in what is now the oceans. But we don’t we see basalt under the ocean floor. That is chemically different from granite and produces different mix of weathered products.
More importantly basalt is higher density than granite, so for a block of granite 3 km thick or more, it won’t subduct. I will float, or collide in a continental collision and attach itself to another continent. It won’t disappear.into the center of the earth. It is like an ice cube that floats in water, with part of it sticking up above the water.
With all this as background, we need to figure out how the world got from the state above, to the state we observe today with 95% of the fossiliferous sediments on top of the granite continental blocks. It looks like this:
Now the continents occupy about 30% of the surface area of the earth. and they have about 88% of the sediments on top of them. The oceans have only about 12% of the world’s sediment. I just spent time looking up an old paper of mine and doing this calculation from the data in it.
So, several questions arise. If the preflood earth was a single outer crust and made of granite. where is the granite that collapsed into the void left by the water?
If the preflood crust was basalt, and there was no granite, where did the granitic platforms come from?
Given that sand and clay, the major sedimentary clastics are weathering products where were they stored prior to the flood and how did they land on the topographic highs?
Why is the sediment so thin in the oceans, given that if you speed up continental drift as YECs are want to claim, the heat generated from friction would boil the oceans away.
How did the animals get mixed into the sediment on top of the platform?
furthermore, why does almost every stratigraphic layer have burrows, footprints in it. Below is a picture of burrows from a well core. I collected several thousand feed of pictures from this well bore and all of the cores have burrows.
Here is from another oil well at 8500 ft deep.
don’t try to tell me these are escape features . A human buried by 3 feet of snow in an avelanche can’t move his body. Do you really think a worm buried by 4 -10 feet of sediment is going to be able to move his body? Burrows are made by digging down from the sediment surface, and a void is created in that sediment so in a normal burrow , they can move, but if buried suddenly by 3-4 ft of packed dirt, they can’t move.
Meanwhile these sediments show evidence of normal river channels being cut into the sediment while this flood is occurring, and evidence of drainage canyons having been cut into the sediments. The sharp points of the fingers of this system prove the erosion happened above water. Canyons cut underwater have rounded updip edges. It shows geophysical evidence hundreds of meteor impacts during this flood of yours and of turtles pooping on ancient beaches. I gave this fossil to my 7 year old grandson but it comes from the Betisboka formation of Madagascar. He loved that fossil. lol His mother was less thrilled about it.
So, when you can coherently and with knowledge explain how all these features ended up on top of the continents, you might have something. As of now, you don’t even have the beginning of an explanation, and there is far more of this stuff that I have not mentioned in this post. I won’t respond further to you until you cogently explain how all this came together, including where was the sand, how did it weather from the granite so quickly, where are the blocks of granite (or basalt) that fell into the voids? They don’t show up on deep ocean seismic data, I have examined a lot of that stuff in my career.
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It was a question asked repeatedly in the forum.
Now, I understand. when you originally said:
You seem dead set on why I reject the book of Mormons but don’t reject the Torah. Well it’s the same for why I reject all religions except for Christianity as being true.
Since I believe in Christianity that means that I accept the word of God as being true
usually, after “dead set” comes the word ‘against’, and since I hadn’t said I was against what your reasons, I wasn’t sure why or exactly what you were saying.
Your reason for rejecting Mormonism is perfectly fine FOR A CHRISTIAN. One of the things that bothers me about the way Christians present their case is that their reasons they offer work only for those who are already Christians. That isn’t good.
Consider the person who has no religion, but he has just been convinced that materialism is untrue, so he looks at various religions.
The choices are:
Religion 1…………………Religion 2…………………Religion 3
nothing observable ………nothing observable………something observably verifiable
Theology 1……………….Theology 2…………… Theology 3
As he looks at the above, if there is a religion that actually has something observable to verify its truth, that becomes a very attractive religion.
But if the situation is as below:
Religion 1…………………Religion 2…………………Religion 3
nothing observable ………nothing observable………nothing observable
Theology 1……………….Theology 2…………… Theology 3
In this case, the guy has no logical basis upon which to chose his religion. It becomes a matter merely of what he likes rather than what is TRUE. In such a situation, and this is where Accommodationalism places Christianity, religion becomes merely a matter of preference but which might not have any real metaphysical stuff behind it. And I think this problem shows up as illustrated by Sealkin’s view that we can find God in other religions, outside of Christianity. This is universalism. If this is true, that God works in all religions, then there is no particular reason to believe one religion over another. This is what accommodationalism does, it removes a reason to believe our religion.
Above, you wrote, “I accept the word of God as being true”, the question I want to ask, from this outsider’s perspective, is WHY do you accept it as being true? Is it just in the form of a logical assumption? Like we assume the 5th postulate of Euclid (given a line and a point there is only one line which can be drawn through the point parallel to the line)? We can’t prove it but we believe it?
Accepting the word of God is good, don’t get me wrong, but for the outsider, for someone like me who spent years living in the outsider’s shoes, even if I never left the faith, the question of why believe this or that is important.
Let’s continue with the analogy of Euclid’s geometry.
When you consider the 3 major branches of geometry-Euclidean, Riemannian and Lobachevskian the only difference is in the 5th postulate. This concerns how many lines, parallel to another line, can go through a point exterior to the original line. Euclid say 1; Riemann said Infinite lines; Lobachevsky said none. All geometries are self consistent in a 3 spatial dimensional universe.(see Misner Thorne and Wheeler say in their massive tome on Gravitation, p. 1212)
So, using different assumptions we get different geometries, just like using different theological assumptions we get different theologies.
So let’s say the religions are Pythagorean denominations the situation looks like this:
Euclidean religion………Rieman.Religion ………Lobochevski.Religion 3
nothing observable ………nothing observable………nothing observable
Theology 1……………….Theology 2…………… Theology 3
observation can answer the question of which Pythagorean denomination is right.
But with Accommodationalims, verification of the religion is removed, and when, in addition, as we saw on the Miracles in Judaism and Christianity thread, many want also to remove miracles from Christianity, then, in my mind, the question become, what is left for one to believe? What is left for Christianity to even be attractive to a guy like our hypothetical ex-materialist?
In my opinion, accommodationalism is really about believers, compartmentalizing this problem of origins so that it won’t threaten the logical basis of their belief system. I think this is the same reason YECs hold so vehemently to their false science. To give it up threatens the logical basis of their faith. Accommodation plays the same role in the logical structure of many non-YECs.
I think there is a better way–find a way to make Genesis 1, the Fall, the Flood real.